Samsung has been serious about making its own chips and this year’s breed of Exynos processors performed really well when compared to Qualcomm’s offering, being the chipset of choice for the latest smartphones from the Korean manufacturer. For next year, Samsung is already working on the next Exynos, the 8890, which will reportedly power the upcoming Galaxy S7. Rumors published a couple of weeks ago suggested that the new chips would enter mass production early in December. However, a new report directly from Korea claims that the chip has already entered mass production, although this is just a rumor.
Although we are still a few months away from seeing the chip coming to life, there were several leaks that gave us a pretty picture of what to expect from Samsung. For starters, it will be more powerful than ever. The current Exynos 7420 is a beast, already, leaving the Snapdragon 810 far behind in several tests. The 8890 will overpower its predecessor as leaked Geekbench tests showed us. The 7420 scored 4547 points on the multi-core test and 1443 points on the single-core test. The 8890 scored 5434 points on the multi-core and 1532 on the single-core tests, a significant increase in performance. Composed by a series of custom ARMv8 64-bit cores, the octa-core SoC is likely to be/already is being manufactured on a 14nm FinFET node, which offers better performance and power consumption when compared to 20nm-chips.
Another important rumored aspect of the Galaxy S7 and the Exynos 8890 is that it is said to feature a Cat.12 LTE modem, which if true will be the first smartphone in the world to do so. The current Galaxy S6/S6 edge has Cat.6 LTE capable of speeds of up to 300 Mbps. The Cat.12 LTE allows for data transfers of up to 603 Mbps, although actual speeds always depend on carriers. Samsung has historically launched its smartphones with both their own Exynos chip and Qualcomm’s Snapdragon family but this year the company decided to ditch the Snapdragon 810 over overheating issues. For the S7, though, Samsung is expected to ship the phone in two versions again, with the Snapdragon 820 headed to the U.S. and China, and the Exynos 8890 for the rest of the world. The Galaxy S7 is expected to be unveiled on February, so we are still a few months away from it but not that far, so stay tuned for more news, as we should start getting rumors about the design and other features of the upcoming Samsung flagship.